How did you learn OpenGL and GUI-programming?

[tcarisland]

Hi, I'm now a computer science student with a background in art history, photography and some minor experience in graphic design and illustration. 

The programme I'm attending is called "Nanoelectronics", which means I learn about a mix between programming, analog and digital circuit design. One of the main motivations behind this is because I've been dabbling with Digital Audio Workstations and drawing since I was a teenager, and these courses are the closest I can come to learning about image processing, signal processing and maybe even learn enough electronics to learn how an analog synthesizer is made.

 

I've noticed you talk a lot about how Affinity Designer uses OpenGL to render graphics efficiently, and for this reason I've become very curious about what OpenGL is and how to use it.

 

The courses I've taken up to now have been about OOP with Java, programming in C and x86 Assembly Language, but there's been very little choice in learning how to program GUIs and graphics programming with OpenGL. I've been looking for good books on the subject, and I find the quality of computer science books are not always that great.

 

My favourite books that have helped me the most were "Big Java, Late Objects" by Cay Horstman and "The C Programming Language" by K&R (the Floyd and Buchla book on "Electronics Fundamentals" was great too, but that wasn't exactly a programming book).

So my question is. How did you (the developers) learn how to program native GUI applications for OS X (macOS)? And how did you teach yourselves OpenGL?

I noticed there's a book nicknamed "The Red Book", but from what I've read, some like it, some hate it. I'm still finding the learning curve of Xcode to be a little off-putting (even though I find programming Swing applications in Eclipse fairly easy). So I'm wondering where to start, and how other people started learning about Cocoa, Objective-C etc... and how GUI applications in OS X are structured.

I hope this isn't too off topic, but I think it would be nice to hear from the developers about how you got to where you are now making useful software.